• Sex Trafficking / Trafficking for Commercial Sexual Exploitation

Persons (men, women and transgender) are trafficked for the purpose of exploiting them as prostitutes (selling their bodily sex), making pornographic films and other objectionable material on them, or using them for phone sex etc. They are lured with false promises of marriage, career in glamorous sectors like films and modelling, or are fraudulently (date rape, black mailing) or forcibly (abduction) procured and sold into the sex trade

• Labor Trafficking / Trafficking for exploitation in the labor sector

Persons (men women and transgender) are trafficked for the purpose of exploiting their bodily labor in the labor sector. The labor sector exploitation involves non-payment or underpayment of wages, making them work in subhuman conditions, loss of freedom to move around or to sell their labor in the open labor market, forced induction of their family members by way of replacement, etc. Children trafficked on brick kilns, men trafficked as farm labor, children used in the supply chains of some high-end products (like cocoa plantations for chocolate industry or mica mines for cosmetic products), or as domestic help are some examples.

• Trafficking for entertainment / Trafficking for exploitation in the clandestine entertainment industry

Persons (men, women and transgender) are trafficked for the purpose of exploiting them in illegal or exploitative entertainment establishments like circus, dance bars, tamasha (vulgar folk theatre), nude clubs, lap dancing, pornographic films, etc. The girls and women trafficked for shadow entertainment are often forced to moonlight as prostitutes. While some backward communities are found to be extremely vulnerable to such trafficking for dance bars and mujras, there are cases of educated young men and girls aspiring to be actors and models falling victim to casting couch syndrome and getting trafficked into prostitution rackets.

• Human Organ Trade Trafficking / Trafficking for harvesting organs from living human beings

Persons (men, women and transgender) are trafficked for the purpose of forcibly and deceptively harvesting their bodily organs such as kidneys, liver, skin, blood etc. They cannot be manufactured unlike an industrial product. They have to be harvested from a human being dead or alive. Human organs being in great demand and the organ seekers being willing to pay any price for getting the required organ the stakes go very high. Often medical professionals and hospital managements are found involved in human organ trade under the technical garb of human organ transplantation. The latter works as an innocent and purely technical fronting for the nefarious activity of trade in human organs.

Persons caught up in acute financial crisis sometimes become so desperate that they can easily be deceived and trafficked by the criminal gangs running the human organ racket to give away his/her organs. Sometimes organs are taken away from a person by force. In some recent cases in Mumbai the victims stated that the doctors and the agents had told them that once a kidney is given in a few months’ time a new kidney grows in the body naturally.

• Trafficking for illegal human clinical trials of drugs

Every medical drug before it is put to official use must pass through clinical trials including on human beings. There are officially laid down safety measures and rules for carrying out such trials. The malpractices wherein such rules are flouted, compromised and clinical trials are carried out on human beings who are subjected to it by using the means used for trafficking such as deceiving, forcing, abusing the vulnerability of the person, abusing one’s power over another person, getting consent by offering benefits or money, etc. Such trials endanger the life and health of the persons subjected to it and take no responsibility to make up for the damage. 

• Trafficking of children sold/ to be sold for illegal adoption

New born babies, infants and young children are stolen from the custody of their parents or legal guardians and abandoned unescorted babies, infants and young children are taken into possession in order to sell them for profits in the illegal adoption rackets or to sell them to the adults or couples looking for unclaimed babies to be illegally adopted. This is Trafficking of children to be sold in illegal adoption.

• Trafficking for begging / Trafficking for exploitation in organized beggary

Persons (men, women and transgender) are trafficked for the purpose of making them beg in public places and make profits thereupon. Persons of all ages are trafficked for the criminally organized beggary rackets. Persons are disfigured, blinded, maimed, their limbs are mutilated, in order to invoke empathy disgust or fear in the potential alms giver and consequently get the alms. This in turn has led to stealing of new born infants from public places and maternity homes. Often old abandoned persons are trafficked for beggary and their organs are harvested.

• Mail Bride Trafficking / Trafficking of women to be exploited as free labor and sex provider by under the garb of marriage

Persons (mostly girls and young women) are deceptively or forcibly, or by the abuse of their vulnerability or by offering them incentives purchased as brides but are actually used for sexual pleasure often by the men for some time and are then abandoned. In some cases, they are exploited as a common wife of all men in a family and as a common unpaid labor.

Girls, and young women are trafficked for the purpose of exploiting their body, sexuality and labor by making them believe that they are getting married to someone or by forcibly marrying them. There are different types within the larger phenomenon of bride trafficking. Foreigners, especially Muslim men from Arabic countries, come down to predominantly Muslim areas in India and work out a contract marriage with the local Muslim girls by paying or otherwise luring their parents. These are temporary contract marriages called Muttah marriage which are apparently legitimate under the Muslim personal law but in actuality many of these are so temporary that they may last just for a few minutes. Such system also saves the man from directly engaging a prostitute for sexual pleasure and thus evade legal risks in doing so.

In other similar cases girls and women from depressed areas and families are engaged by men of states like Haryana which have an acute shortage of women and hence of brides. In the ill-reputed systems of Haryana namely ‘Paro’ and ‘Molki’ poor class young women are made to marry one man but are used as a common wife by all the brothers and even the father of the man without accepting any responsibility toward or conferring any rights on that woman. These women are simultaneously exploited as unpaid farm labor.

• Trafficking as child soldiers / Trafficking to exploit children by forcing them to become soldiers

Persons (men, women and transgender) are forcibly inducted illegally (by non-state bodies) for the purpose of engaging them in armed hostilities like wars, terrorism, ethnic aggression, ultra-radical political movements, arms trade etc. There were cases of such trafficking of children in the Naxal affected areas (the infamous red corridor) in India.

Introduction

Traditionally, the practice of slavery was understood in a limited manner, as operating at the farm and later at the small factories’ levels where the master/owner – slave contact was direct. With industrialization and globalization of goods and services, the owner – slave direct contact and interaction have become hazy. The process of producing the final product from a variety of capital goods and other raw materials and the procuration of the raw material itself has become very remote and complex. In this often long stretched production line, at one end we find the extremely refined outlets selling refined products, while on the other end there is a large number of human beings. This is the supply chain.

The world is now awakening to the shameful reality that some of the high end and refined products are often a result of extreme exploitation of labor working in an informal, often subhuman conditions. Mining of mica for cosmetics, production and harvesting of cocoa for chocolate industry, brick making for construction industry, electronic spare parts and their assembly for high end electronic goods are some examples of the supply chain exploitation. The increasing reports on this front indicate an alarming situation of trafficking of persons for exploiting them in the supply chain.

What is a ‘supply chain’?

There are multiple definitions of the term supply chain. As per OECD, the term “supply chain” is used to refer to the network of organizations that cooperate to transform raw materials into finished goods and services for consumers.

According to 6 USCS § 901, the term “international supply chain” means the end-to-end process for shipping goods to or from the United States beginning at the point of origin (including manufacturer, supplier, or vendor) through a point of distribution to the destination.

The Canadian Supply Chain Sector Council states that definitions of a “supply chain” virtually universally encompass the following three functions:

I. supply of materials to a manufacturer;

II. the manufacturing process; and,

III. the distribution of finished goods through a network of distributors and retailers to a final customer. Companies involved in various stages of this process are linked to each other through a supply chain.

Intergenerational Trafficking:

Intergenerational trafficking mostly practiced in sex trade and labour bondage is the institutionalized way of trafficking the next generation of traffic victims as the victims can offer little resistance to the trafficker and the state and the society fail to take cognizance of the gravity of the offence and instead justify it as custom or cultural tradition.

Institutionalized Trafficking:

Some practices of human trafficking are carried out for generations, linked with the sacred symbols of the society to which the exploiters and the exploited belong, and is not perceived by the state and the society as anything grossly objectionable or criminal. The trafficking of very young girls in the devadasi system, or in the sex trade as seen in the Dalit communities of Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh etc. or that of the girls from Bancchada, Bedia, Nat and Rajnat communities of North West India are some examples. The entire operation appears frictionless and without explicit coercion, violence or bloodshed.